1862-President Lincoln received first group of Blacks to confer with a U.S. president on a matter of public policy. He urged Blacks to emigrate to Africa or Central America and was bitterly criticized by Northern Blacks.

1959- Famous Basketball player and former LA Laker Irving “Magic” Johnson was born.

1970- City University of New York inaugurated open admissions policy designed to increase the number of poor and minority students.

August 15

Congresswoman Maxine Waters/AP

1843- National Black convention met at Buffalo, New York, with some seventy delegates from twelve states. The highlight of the convention was a stirring address by Henry Highland Garnet, a twenty-seven-year-old-Presbyterian pastor, who called for a slave revolt and a general slave strike. Amos G. Beman of New Heaven, Conn., was elected president of the convention.

1938- U.S. Congresswoman Maxine Waters was born. Waters is a Democrat from California.

1975- Race Riots in Dixmoor, a Chicago suburb began.

August 16

1963- The first African American artist George Olden designed a U.S. postage stamp. This day the stamp was designed to commemorate the one-hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation.

1970- Activist Angela Davis was named in a federal warrant issued in connection with George Jackson’s attempted escape from San Quentin prison.

1987- Historian, scholar, former president of Central State College and author Charles H. Wesley, known for his work, “The History of Alpha Phi Alpha: A Development in College Life,” died.

August 17

1887- Marcus Garvey, the father of the Black Nationalist and Pan African movements was born in St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica.

1984- Roberto Clemente, born in Puerto Rico of Black and Hispanic heritage, was the second baseball player to be featured on a stamp.

August 18

1963: The first African American person was admitted to the University of Mississippi, James Meredith, graduates from the university.

1964: South Africa was banned from the Olympic Games because of its apartheid policies.

1791- Benjamin Banneker writes letter to then Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson. The letter showed the hypocrisy of slavery. Banneker challenged the idea of freedom for whites as the ascribed it to be the same freedom that should be granted to Africans.

1958- The first sit-ins by the NAACP Youth Council began to win concessions in a Southern State in modern times occurred in restaurants in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

August 20

1939- Wynston Brown became the first president of the National Negro Bowling Association in Detroit, Michigan.

1942- Composer, songwriter, musician and singer Isaac Hayes was born in Covington, Tennessee.